Randy Tupper, Clear Creek golf pro, explains the differences in the new back nine as the sprinklers go off on the new hole 14 at the Clear Creek Golf Course. (Jon GiffinThe Vicksburg Post)

[10/10/04]The Clear Creek Golf Course in Bovina is ready to open a full 18 holes and embrace golfers once again. After having half the course closed for six months, construction on the front nine holes is complete and Clear Creek will tee off its full reopening with a ceremony on Monday at 2 p.m.

With the reopening, the front nine and back nine will switch, meaning holes 1-9 now will be 10-18 and vice versa.

Tee times have been booked in advance for the first crack at the redesigned holes.

“It’s going to bring it up to a more modern style of golf course,” said longtime member Charles Lewis, who is signed up for one of the first few tee times. “It’s really been needing that for a long time. It’ll be much better.”

Golfers had been limited to playing the back nine while construction on the front nine took place from April until the end of September.

Clear Creek golf pro Randy Tupper said the size and design of the greens have been changed, bunkers and trees have been added, and the course has been shortened by 80 yards. Asphalt cart paths also have been placed around much of the front nine which will now be the back nine, changing from Nos. 1-9 to 10-18.

Many golfers had been concerned that the changes would lead to increased difficulty of Warren County’s only public course, but Tupper said to have no fear.

“Being a public course, you want them to be able to come out here and enjoy themselves,” Tupper said. “This is not a Jack Nicklaus design, there is no ego here. We don’t want to beat them up, we don’t want them losing a dozen or two balls and shooting 10 or 15 shots higher than what they’re expecting to shoot. Why would they come back? They come out here to enjoy it, not get beat up.”

The biggest difference will show in putting. The previous greens were simply mounds of dirt that were flattened on top with a hole in the middle. The new design features completely rebuilt greens with layers of seed-bed mix to soften greens and make for smoother play.

“A road contractor built this course, so a green to him was just a pile of dirt with a hole in it,” said Lewis, who plays three times a week. “It got by for a quarter of a century like that. You get to thinking about it, this course is 25 years old and has never, ever had anything done to it to keep up with the times.”

The greens have slight sloping and curving, and feature hills and bunkers. They also have increased in size. The No. 9 green, now No. 18, had the largest area at 4,600 square feet. The average green area of the new back nine is now 5,200.

“I don’t want to be ugly, but I think they were so happy to have an 18-hole golf course in 1979 that they didn’t care necessarily how it was constructed,” Tupper said. “All these greens are built with seed-bed mix and they’re going to be so much softer, so much more playable.”

Golfers now have to think about their approach to each hole, rather than just hitting the ball as far as possible, Tupper said. Still, the Mississippi Golf Association rated the new design as easier than the previous one.

“Golf is one of the fastest growing sports in the world and you’ve got to keep up with the times,” Lewis said. “When I first started coming out here, a lot of people from Jackson used to come over here, and from Monroe. As the new courses opened in Jackson with the more modern design, everything just went downhill here.”

The final cost of the project is estimated at $362,000, of which $300,000 came from the Warren County Board of Supervisors and $25,000 was generated from an increase in the cart fee.

The land for the Clear Creek Golf Course was bought by the Warren County Board of Supervisors and the 18-hole course was constructed in 1978. Tupper said the course had a very simple design when it was created, and plans had been discussed since 1996 to redesign the holes and bring them up to modern standards.

Opportunity presented itself in September 2003 when Dr. Alan Henn of Mississippi State University diagnosed the greens on the front nine with “Bermuda grass decline,” a fungus that forms black lesions on the roots of grass and eats away at them.

After a $250,000 loan approval by the Board, construction to remove the soil and reshape the greens started April 19 but has hit several snags along the way.

An unusually wet summer 11.1 inches of rain in June alone led to 36 rain days on which crews could not work. The crews were pressed for time to begin sprigging grass on the greens before cooler weather set in. Temperatures below 70 degrees at night could have jeopardized the proper growth of the grass. The greens on holes 12, 13 and 14 were the last to be grown in and are still incomplete.

In July, vandals destroyed windows, fixtures and electric hand-dryers in restrooms at the golf and soccer complexes and a lakeside pavilion in Bovina. Officials estimated the cost of repairs as much as $18,000.

Despite the setbacks, Clear Creek reached its projected ending date of Oct. 1. Now plans are in the works for renovating the remaining original nine holes.

“Now the question is, When are you going to start back there?'” Tupper said.

Whenever construction does begin, Tupper said it won’t be anything like the last few months.

“I do forsee when we do the renovations on this side that we do it three holes at a time instead of nine holes at a time,” Tupper said, “because of the loss of revenue and a lot of stress on everybody that works out here.”